


/I. 



10721 
^C9Z 57 



ORAJION. 

lEV. AT L. STONE, D.D. 





BY 



Mr. President, and G-entlemen of the Alumni : 

In the ordinary habit of our thought, we do not associate ma- 
ternity with youth. A mother's welcome, while it breathes the 
cherishing tenderness which never grows old, has in it also, as we 
usually conceive it, something of the venerableness of age. All 
the more is this true, if we speak the word not in reference to the 
household tie, but as expressing the gentle providence of institu- 
tions which have molded and nurtured our intellectual Ufe. But 
as we turn back this day from the manifold dusty paths our feet 
have been treading, to keep the annual tryst of our hterary mem- 
ories and fellowship, the genius of this scene, greetmg us at her 
gateway, is so yoimg and fair that it seems a hberty for bearded 
lips to offer filial salutations. Youthful vows were a more appro- 
priate tribute to this girhsh matron than the sentiment of venera- 
tion. Here are no ancient academic shades, keeping in their 
whispering leaves, and telling to-day on the summer air, the memo- 
rial of classic generations. Our grove wears, indeed, the honors 
of many years, but the antiquity is of nature, not of humanity, 
much less of the lineage of student Hfe. 

We have a new college and a new State, adventurmg the future 
together. If here are no smooth-worn thresholds of halls of 
learning, here also around us are no moss-grown walls of empire. 
The youngest of these " magistri artium " is older than Califor- 
nia as an American State, and thrice as old as the young mother 
dismissing him to-day with the laurels of her favor, to work out 
practically the horoscope of his destiny. 

Let me keep hold of this association of civic and literary life, 
and detain you, for a while, upon this theme — The relation of the 



6 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

College to the State. While I use the term " State " in its fuller and 
more comprehensive meaning, the discussion will have its chief 
bearing upon the growth and fortunes of our own Pacific common- 
wealth. Certainly, unless all our hopes deceive us, unless the 
bright prophecies of our brief but rapid and almost miraculous 
progress speak with lying lips, unless the indomitable energy and 
enterprise of our American character fail this once, and on a thea- 
ter so inspiring, there is before us, on these shores, a splendid and 
marvelous future. If we measure our coming advance only by 
the past, what a prodigious growth in all the fruits of a prospering 
and victorious civilization will not the next score of years display. 
Before we shall have exhausted the last third of this declining 
century, the waters of this Bay will be girded with one almost un- 
broken zone of population and wealth ; around this serrated margin 
of twice a hundred miles, parted only by the seaward gate and the 
northern strait, village will stretch its hand to village, and town to 
town ; the gardens of fair country seats will touch one another ; 
yonder metropohs, crowned Queen of the Pacific, will be peer in 
her jeweled magnificence to any throned rival on this Western 
Continent ; a hundred convoys of trade, travel and treasure will 
tread, with flashing feet, the length and breadth of this sunny har- 
bor ; from these mountain sides, tolerant of culture to the very 
summit, and on the twin rivers that drain our broad interior valley, 
will pour down agricultural supphes enough to fill the granaries of 
a nation ; the marshy wastes of tule lands, redeemed from winter 
overflow and cleared of their reedy forests, will show the bloom of 
boundless garden-prairies ; the torn ravines of mining regions will be 
built into picturesque and populous towns ; iron tracks will stretch 
away through the interminable northern forests, making Oregon and 
Sitka our neighbors ; between the snowy peaks of the Sierra Ne- 
vadas, shaking the dust of the desert from his mane, the iron horse, 
caparisoned in our farthest East, will thunder down these western 
slopes ; the confluent streams of a world-wide immigration will, pour 
in their floods of vigorous life ; the peaceful ocean will empty 
through the ever-open Golden Gate the spoils of fleets freighted in 
China and the Indies ; and the ceaseless enginery of our mints will 
coin from out our hills the shining currency of a wealth to whose 
copiousness God and nature alone can set bounds. 



j5 I know the American dialect is thought to have a large capacity 



•) \y^ \ ORATION. 



I 



for boastful periods, and this picture which I have sketched may 
seem to some colored with hues of dreamland. But only recite 
the sober record of facts which half the Ufetime of a generation 
has chronicled amid these homes, and we have a more wondrous 
poem than I have sung for twice that range of future years. To 
this large coming development, we of the present stand in the 
relation of foster parents. We are architects and builders of this 
rising greatness. Not that in our indolence or neglect the august 
fabric will not go up, but that the strength of that fabric and the moral 
aspect of that greatness will depend upon the foundations thus early 
laid, and the aims and uses which the builders propose. The de- 
terminate influence of Educational Institutions upon the w^hole prob- 
lem, we cannot, without underlying the just imputation of folly and 
crime, refuse to weigh. Our citizenship in the State, as well as our 
allegiance to letters, or in fewer words, our duty as patriot schol- 
ars, constrains the discussion to which we now advance. 

1. We want the College in the new young life of the State, as a 
bond with the past. There is no such thing as a full and complete 
life for the individual or for the State, if that life does not join 
itself to the whole life of humanity. Much of the past will, indeed, 
empty itself in upon us without our consciousness. The rudest 
will inherit more generously than he knows of the treasures accu- 
mulated in by-gone ages. He is the child of a long line of pro- 
genitors, though he cannot name his ancestry. But in proportion 
as his ignorance isolates him from the results of the sum total of 
human progress, must his life be fragmentary and unendowed. He 
is a foundling, for whom there is waiting an heirship of riches and 
honors unrevealed to him, and by which, therefore, his poverty and 
obscurity will never be reheved. 

By our circumstances and history, this same isolation charac- 
terized our early beginnings as a commonwealth. Our infancy was 
that of a foundlmg. We were disconnected with the old. Laws, re- 
Hgions, home-ties, and all the sweet and solemn voices of philosophy, 
faith and letters, were left behind when Ave were flung upon these 
western shores to struggle as we could out of anarchy and barba- 
rism. Our social being was not the onflow of a stream holding in 
its deep and broad channel the tributaries of all past times and 



» ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

growths, but a solitary fountain, gushing single, fitful and turbid in 
the wilderness. We have to connect the issue of this fountain with 
that grand current bearing on its bosom and mingling in its waters 
the world's full life and thought. Deny to us, deny to any people, 
no matter what their origin and story, the record and knowledge of 
the past, the testimony of humanity's long empiric travail, and such 
connection remains impossible. How great the forfeiture ! " When 
ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away," says Burke, 
*'the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment, we 
have no compass to govern us ; nor can we know distinctly to what 
port to steer." Lost are the influence and example of the illustri- 
ous dead, the heroic deeds that kindle and feed the flame of valor 
and self-devotion, the quickening and instructive annals of history, 
the songs of the bards — stairways to the heaven of imagination — the 
warning voiced forth in the reiterated lessons of man's errors, frail- 
ties and passions ; the teachings of philosophy wresthng with the 
great questions of truth and the soul, the painful but resolute steps 
of explorers and discoverers leading on the ages after them up the 
heights of science, the full intelligence of causes, natural and philo- 
sophic, seen at work in the present, but whose origin, nature and 
alliances lie remote up the centuries ; the slow but grand drama of 
the mute earth, proceeding under the twin ministry of two great 
magicians — fire and water — from her primal chaos to the fair com- 
pleteness of her verdurous hills, her islanded deep, and her stead- 
fast mountains, and the lengthening golden chain that makes us 
one in blood and sympathy, history and heritage with the whole 
human family. 

Would it be but a trifling bereavement of our modern civilization 
thus to orphan it from the maternity and nurture of the past ? As 
w^ell girdle an oak, and expect its branches to bear up the same 
wealth of frondent and lusty life ; as well cut ofi" in mid-length that 
northern river that empties the great lakes, and expect its channel 
to bear on the same majestic stream to the sea. 

But the guardiansliip and transmission of this dowry of the past 
are in the hands of the world's teachers as trustees for mankind. 
These treasures are locked up in the languages of dead empires, 
the systems of buried sages, the alcoves of old hbraries, the labora- 
tories of science. The halls of liberal culture open backward into 



ORATION. » 

these galleries of antiquity, and onward into the life of the present, 
giving to the exploring eye, beneath their arches, the long vista of 
the progress of the race. 

What is our sacred trust for the future ? What have we to 
transmit to those who come after us ? A name only, and a clear 
field for adventure ; or the entire riches which the ages have accu- 
mulated, and for which the generations which have gone down to 
the dust have wrought through the heat of great harvest (^ays ? 

We ask no unreasoning homage for the wisdom of the elders ; 
but a little more reverence for antiquity w^ill not hurt us in our 
personal and national development. It is needed as a corrective of 
that flippant self-sufficiency that dashes with arrogance our confi- 
dent American energy, and of that smattering of universal knowl- 
edge that conceives it has nothing to learn. The spirit of the 
true scholar is the spirit of humiUty, and the reverent inquirer 
after truth finds that — 

" Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, 
That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks." 

2. We want the College, again, in aUiance with the life of the 
State, for the security and honor of repubHcan principles. We 
believe in a Government not of despotic force, nor of kings en- 
throned ''^ jure divino^^ nor of a privileged class, of better blood 
and clay and larger pohtical rights than the mass of the governed ; 
but of equal laws, framed by the popular will, expressing and 
guarding popular rights, and administered by representatives elected 
by popular suiFrage. It is one of the commonplaces of pohtical 
truths, that despotism can maintain itself only in the unreasoning 
debasement of its subjects. Ignorance and superstition are the 
twin pillars of all unequal and oppressive pohtical systems. These 
sayings are as familiar with us as household words, but they need 
continual and emphatic reutterance. Against every form of unjust 
privilege and political absolutism, the one conquering and invincible 
champion is popular education. Light antagonizes force with a 
soft and silent but resistless mastery. It debates the questions of 
privilege, it examines the foundations of caste ; it sifts the theories of 
special and restricted rights ; it illumines and dispels the illusions 
of kingcraft and tyranny, as the beams of morning the dark retir- 
ing shadows of night ; it discovers the true sources of political power. 



10 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

and gives voice to the deathless instinct of humanity^ pleading 
before in dumb murmurings for its inalienable endowments of " life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 

Education, especially where it is large and liberal, gives the 
broad mind and the catholic spirit, enlarges from all narrowness, 
emancipates from prejudice, and nurtures universal sympathies. 
This is the original force of the term liberal education, the fine and 
true philosophy shut up in language itself. Education is a libera- 
tor ; it makes thought free, inquiry free, behef the child of light 
and full conviction, the whole manhood free. And in this disen- 
thralling process it quickens in us the fraternal recognition of all 
other manhood. The close encircling barriers that isolate man from 
man, by the accidents of birth and place, of race and color, are 
thrown down by this expansive force ; and a large and just view of 
our common nature, as in origin, faculties and possibiHties one, 
sweeps all who wear the image of God within the wide horizon 
and the tender bonds of the universal human family. 

By such enlargement, we touch the deep, vital principle of gen- 
uine Republicanism — the true doctrine of political equality. That 
doctrine is the equality of man with man, as a creature of God — 
in all the powers of a reasoning mind and an immortal soul ; an 
equality, which titles and purples, and political prescriptions and 
social interdicts, however they may overlay and obscure, cannot 
disturb. A republican equality thus discerned and understood, 
will be fearless and consistent. It will outlaw all caste. It will 
suffer no brand of serfdom and villenage, and no shadow of such a 
brand to rest upon any forehead that covers a human brain. In 
due process of enfranchisement, it will crown with the full honors 
and immunities of citizenship all within the bounds of the State 
whom it calls its fellow men. 

But the provision for liberal culture does not content itself with 
a mere proclamation of repubHcan equality, however true in princi- 
ple and noble as a testimony. It works out the practical elevation 
of the lowly. It lets down a ladder to the very lowest grade of 
Social life, on which the humblest aspirant may climb to the highest. 
In lands where aristocratic institutions order the social scale, as in 
England, the chief places of honor and emolument are awarded, 
as the rule, by interest, and birth, and titled precedence. With us 



ORATION. 11 

the class is larger than with any other people, of those who are 
dependent upon self-help for all personal and professional success ; 
and while our political theories say to the brown son of penury and 
toil, the child of the plowman and the artisan, " You are the peer 
of the heirs of wealth and station," our system of education offers 
to his hand the prizes which the slack fingers of effeminate for- 
tune reach after in vain. The wealth of a nation's intellectual life 
is thus immeasurably increased, and she is served in her high 
places of trust and duty by the most vigorous of her sons. The 
succession of her great men and strong leaders is veined continually 
by fresh blood. There is no ruling class, keeping its overshadow- 
ing ascendency long after it has become effete with indolence, lux- 
ury and vice. New names and new families rise out of the stern 
schools of want and hardship, bringing up from such nurture men 
of bone and muscle for the charge of great enterprises, and the 
tasks of public Hfe. The purest gems of mental brilliance, which 
had else kept their lusters hid in " dull imprisonment," are thus 
unearthed, wrought and poHshed, and set to shine with guiding 
splendor in the nation's coronet. Nor is this the triumph of ple- 
bian weakness, the crowning of rudeness and rusticity, to the shame 
and discountenancing of elegance and courtliness. It is the promo- 
tion and the accrediting of the only worthy aristocracy, the peer- 
age of intellect, the nobility of learning and thought, starred with 
the brilliants of wit, and ermined with the refinement of lettered 
culture. 

And this issue guards our republican development from peril on 
another side. The wide diffusion of popular intelligence over- 
throws the supremacy of tyrannic force, but does it not create the 
ambitious demagogue, and lead to a war of factions and parties? 
Where the many are stimulated by uncontrolled aspirations, and 
the prizes of advancement, free to all, are the reward of the 
strongest and most resolute, what is to prevent that war of Titans 
in which the many shall contend with equal arms, as when Greek 
meets Greek, each for his own preeminence. And when it is found, 
(as it soon must be found in such a conflict) what force there is in 
combinations, what shall prevent the renewal of the strife, with 
broader front and more formidable tactics, by those stronger spirits 
who will seize the truncheon of command, and march against their 



12 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

rivals with a partisan host at their heels ? But this same intelli- 
gence gives authority to the calm counsels of reason, inspires just 
conceptions of the public good, connects that common welfare with 
the best hopes of all and of each, instructs the popular mind as to 
the horrors of anarchy, evolves the true nature and Hmitations as 
well as the proper beneficence of the social compact, and cuts short 
the career of selfish ambition, by a demand for what is just and 
equal for the commonwealth. The demagogue finds no leadership 
save with those whom he can deceive and beguile; and anarchy 
seeks its throne in Mexico, rather than under the shining heavens 
of the land of Washington. 

Thus our Republicanism is not only conserved, but ennobled. Its 
institutes and laws are not the creatures of ignorance and prejudice, 
carrying on their front as they invite the scrutiny of mankind the 
confession of weakness, coarseness and puerihty. Self-government 
with us is the government of a nation of readers, a nation of 
thinkers, a nation of debaters, guided by the freest and fullest 
philosophic discussion of every great measure incorporated in its 
treaties, statutes and policies. Let the archives of courts and 
cabinets, kingly and imperial, the world over, be challenged for a 
code of public laws surpassing in dignity, purity and wisdom, the 
written scrolls and annual State papers of our Republican legis- 
lation. Thus do the security and honor of free principles go hand 
in hand under the reign of light and knowledge. 

Nor need it be feared that this full and broad culture of letters 
will, in the supreme stress of some great crisis of danger, enervate 
the military arm, and train a race of citizens of too delicate a mold 
of spirit and muscle to defend the life of the Repubhc against the 
weapons of war. Those words of the Athenian Commander and 
Orator, words as instinct with martial ardor as with true homage 
to letters, we may repeat after him — " We are not enfeebled by 
philosophy." When the clarion sounded " to arms " in the nation's 
death-grapple with treason, the loyal ranks were filled, not with 
stolid and reluctant conscripts, but with thinking, reasoning volun- 
teers, every man of Avhom saw and weighed for himself the grandeur 
of the stake for which the deadly game was played. Among all 
the strong-Hmbed youths that rose up at the call, there were none 
that gave a more jubilant response than the dwellers in our peaceful 



ORATION. 18 

Academic shades. They laid aside the toga of quiet study for the 
steel of the soldier's harness as though robing for a feast ; and on 
the march, and around the camp-fires and at " the perilous edge" 
of the fight sang, till every heart was stirred and the heavens rung 
again, old battle chimes of freedom. They had caught from the 
storied dead the inspiration of the martyred patriots of all time, and 
self-devotion for the country's life was as honorable to them as when 
Curtius leaped, man and horse full armed, into the chasm of the 
Forum ; and treason as infamous as when the great Roman orator 
thundered in the Senate against Catiline and his fellow conspira- 
tors. If we needed such confirmation to our faith and hope, we 
shall henceforth have no question concerning the alliance of letters 
with loyalty and valor, since the close of that great struggle that has 
hung the porches of our college halls with laurels of youthful valor, 
and thick-starred our catalogues of student life with the imperisha- 
ble honors of youthful heroes, whose blood has crimsoned a hundred 
battle-fields for union and liberty. 

3. Another office of the College in its influence upon the State 
will be to correct the tendency to materialism against which all 
new communities have to guard. That tendency is especially visi- 
ble in our own local commonwealth. It is, perhaps, inseparable 
from the tasks first fronting the settlers on this coast ; certainly a 
legitimate issue of the objects at first pursued. The explorers of a 
new country naturally find their material wants the most immediate 
and imperative. They must have food and fire, shelter and water, 
wharves and roads. If in addition to this necessity their crowning 
aims are low and material, it will be hard to impregnate their minds 
with lofty and ideal aspirations. They may display a wonderful 
diligence, but always with their eyes fixed upon the earth. Their 
industries, their hopes, their prizes are of the earth, earthy. If 
one of them shout " Eureka," it is not over some victory of science 
making its laboratory luminous w^ith some precious secret wrested 
from nature's keeping, nor some fresh demonstration of philosophy 
establishing a truth for the faith of men ; but only that his hand has 
clutched a lump of gold. Bring before such a mind a scheme to 
elevate the moral and intellectual life within him and around him, 
and you talk in riddles. " The future ! " it only reaches, before 
him, to the next rainy season. '' His children ! " they are on the 



14 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

other side of the mountains, waiting for him to come and empty his 
gold dust at their feet. " A Christian civiHzation ! " all that he 
wants of it is law enough to guard his miner's tent for a year or 
two, and then the busy ravine where he digs may relapse into utter 
barbarism. He is indeed no miser. Show him a sick comrade — 
tell him of wounded and suffering soldiers, and famishing rebels — 
and he scatters his hoard with generous hand. But ask him to 
build institutions, and you get no audience, scarcely a comprehend- 
ing intelligence. He is building his "pile," making haste to top 
up its pyramidal completeness and transfer it to the distant spot 
he still calls "home." Shall we rise no higher than this fitful, 
fluctuating life of materialism, this ebb and flow of successful or 
unsuccessful immigration ? 

The very presence of an institution of learning suggests other 
nobler and more permanent than material interests. Its walls of 
mute masonry are lettered with proclamations visible from afar, that 
declare man's higher needs and more exalted capacities. There is 
an atmosphere around it that thrills through the flesh to the impris- 
oned soul. The dullest eye asks for what do those walls stand, who 
are the workers within, in what mines do they dig ; and the strange 
utterances that float out from the quiet cells waken echoes in torpid 
breasts that give the consciousness of a hfe whose pulses are im- 
mortal. From the vantage of its dome, the outlook is wider and 
keener over the domain of man's being. The horizon broadens 
from the narrowness of the present and the material to the bound- 
lessness of the spiritual, vital after the body is dust ; and the cope 
that carried only the clouds lifts to take in the orbed spheres of 
truth, the starry wonders of science, the great arch toward which 
the soul wings an endless flight. 

The clasped books of knowledge have only to be seen to tempt 
curious fingers. Their very titles stimulate the desire for possession. 
Their pictured pages appeal to the aesthetic element, and it breaks 
through the crust of materialism. The sweet breath of the Ionian 
Isles wakes still and forever the sense of beauty. Art is wooed as 
a mistress. Temples rise in pillared majesty, statues leap forth 
from shapeless marble, and life looks and speaks from the canvas. 
Tuneful hands take the lyre, poets sing, and literature is born. 
Voices, whose accents can never die, sweep down the yellow cur- 



ORATION. 15 

rent of the Tiber, and Right, Duty, Fidehty, Constancy, Law, brides 
of the storied river, lift, on the prow of their barge sailing ever on, 
a scroll luminous with their names, demanding men's homage to 
their queenly rule. 

The College is thus the Court of the Ideal. Its ministers serve 
the scepter of the unseen as though they saw the invisible. Its 
splendors are not jewels dug out of the earth, nor specimens of 
golden veins branching among the hills, but gems of ethereal luster 
which the seers have plucked from the heaven of God's thoughts, 
and brought down to shine for the guidance of human feet. Its 
edicts give laws to taste, establish methods for the reason, decree 
honors to intellectual triumphs, and declare the just rules of civil 
and social life — the codes of all right legislation in every department 
of human being. 

Under its shadow, the mere material type of living is shamed and 
rebuked. The higher nobility of serving truth and right, and the 
growth of the soul, asserts itself without a question ; and not mate- 
rial success and barbaric comfort, but spiritual culture, is seen and 
acknowledged to be the only worthy end of living. 

4. Nor do we in this plea overlook the needs of practical life. 
We provide, in the most effectual manner, for those needs. The 
College trains the men of practical science who hold the secrets of 
all useful art, the most fruitful methods of every branch of industry. 
The time has been when the tillers of the soil preferred the lessons 
of mother wit and daily experience to all the wisdom of the books, 
and scouted the learning that wrought its field tasks and raised its 
crops only in the laboratory. But scientific farming has carried the 
day. We have had blunders enough of ignorance and self-suffi- 
ciency in working the pecuhar wealth of our own State, and but a 
moiety of the legitimate proceeds of our industry is gathered as a 
practical result. The other moiety is drained off in the sluices of 
untutored negligence, or empty quackery ; and if science itself has 
sometimes gone astray, or stood at fault before its problems, we 
have only in this fact a fresh demonstration of the need of more 
patient and exhaustive study. There was never an industry that 
more imperatively needed the conduct of exact science to make it 
safe and profitable than that of this people. If our aims were only 
practical in the grosser sense, mercenary and material, the short- 



16 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

est avenae to their attainment were through the porches of liberal 
learning. 

The ideal leads the practical ; men of thought go before men of 
action ; the student is elder partner of the craftsman, furnishing 
him his tools and supplying his models, and forever it is true that 
" where there is no vision, the people perish." A man with no 
visioned excellence before him, as yet unattained, is at the end of 
his growth, and has begun to decay. The same is true of commu- 
nities and nations. All the triumphs' of human progress, all the in- 
crements of practical growth, are in the inspiration of ideals. Pure 
intelligence is itself with us ultimately and intensely practical. Not 
merely in the sense that all work stands still if this mainspring be 
withdrawn ; nor that life is so individualized with us men, laboring 
not in groups and associations under the intellectual headship of a 
superintendent, or like a gang of slaves beneath the eye and lash of 
an overseer, but each his own employer and master : I mean that 
intelligence has its own sphere of practical work, in which it is a 
day laborer, and of which the products are as solid and substantial, 
and as much a matter of common want, as ploughshares and reap- 
ing hooks. Need we catalogue these wants, in the supply of which 
intellectual culture comes into immediate contact with the getting of 
our daily bread ? Why : we want engineers, and surveyors, and 
chemists, and assay ers, and metallurgists, and machinists, and 
draughtsmen, and interpreters, and editors, and school teachers, and 
a host of fellow-laborers, and whole departments of professional 
scholars, whose day's work is of the brain more than of the hand, 
and all of whom are more nearly or more remotely pensioners upon 
science and liberal learning. I am almost ashamed to argue so nar- 
rowly and upon so low a scale, but the argument is pertinent to 
what we have all seen and felt of popular prejudice and misconcep- 
tion in our forming public sentiment. And you who are my auditors 
to-day will agree, without argument, that the noblest practical 
growth of the State, its truest wealth, and its fairest honor, are not 
only conditioned upon, but identical with its highest intellectual ad- 
vancement. 

5. I have one more thought to suggest in the line of our theme : 
the relation of the College to the permanent and peaceful order of 
society. For itself, the College demands a settled public tranquil- 



ORATION. 17 

lit J. Study craves a quiet atmosphere. It must sit down to its 
work, if it is to Avork effectively ; calm, patient, and secure. It 
seeks naturally the most sequestered scenes of nature for its bow- 
ers. The whispering grove, the bank of the murmuring river, the 
silent shade, the inclosed guarded quadrangle, rural towns far 
from the rattling Avheels of commerce and trade, and the jar of 
machinery, are its immemorial retreats. Wake the tempest of 
commotion and change in the heavens over it ; let the lightnings of 
political storms flash beneath its drooping eyelids, and the bolts and 
shouts of popular revolution crash in upon the absorbed and musing 
thought ; let war blow his trumpet, and the fierce pulses of cannon 
shake the air, and the spell is fled, the charm is broken, the rapt 
devotee is dragged rudely back to the loud, clamorous present, and 
action, instead of study, is the call of the hour. What testimony 
Avas that which reached us from distracted Naples at the beginning 
of this present decade, when the guns of four great forts threat- 
ened its streets and dweUings ? " Our colleges are comparatively 
abandoned, and our learned societies exist but in name." What 
testimony is that, within the decade, from our own rocking land ? 
The Muses fled when the war eagle screamed ; science deserted 
her laboratory for the armory and the bastion ; the flood of patriotic 
ardor drowned out the monkish scholar from his cell ; the halls of 
learning were depopulated ; the young recluses sallied forth ; the 
pen and the inkhorn were exchanged for the rifle and the cartridge 
box ; the student's cassock for the soldier's uniform, and the lead- 
ers in the world of letters for the leaders in arms and the field. 
For its own sake, therefore, the college favors peace and public 
composure, that its own morning and evening bells may ring clear 
on the quiet air. It is not an institution for nomadic tribes. It 
cannot pitch a tent at nightfall and strike it with the next dawn. 
It must dig for foundations, and rear solid walls, and lift its steady 
domes with windows opening to the blue fields above and the blos- 
soming constellations. It asks therefore for restful times, for the 
hush of all overturning tumults, and seeks to insure settled civil 
order and the steadfastness of the State. 

And what it asks, it helps to give. Where popular intelligence 
is diffused, revolutionary ideas may be started, but they have to 
be canvassed. When the demagogue encounters the schoolmaster, 
3 



18 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

his arts are powerless. When priestcraft raeets the spelHng book 
and the Testament, its glozing addresses are silenced. In an en- 
lightened community, each individual feels competent to ask ques- 
tions and try issues. If he be called upon to join a revolutionary 
faction, his reply is, '' Let's look at that." The appeal must be 
to his reason, not to his passions. He has learned to read, and 
the abihty to read is a demand which creates its supply. All pub- 
lic measures are put on trial before this wide public tribunal. This 
reader uses his eyes, and every novel idea of the day is his by 
nightfall, and he has a judgment upon it. His stock of ideas and 
judgments, as to public and general economies and policies, grows 
by continual accessions, and becomes a priA'y council which he can 
summon to a session upon every question of doubtful advantage 
and expediency. 

But let it still be remembered that the amount and scope of pop- 
ular inteUigence depend upon the higher institutions of learning 
among a people. It is the standard in every department of life 
and manners that determines all beneath. Our judgments of what 
is comparative are governed by our conception of the superlative. 
What is high in the presence of great mountains ? What is deep 
when we are sounding the ocean ? The College not only systema- 
tizes popular education, but sustains it ; nay, stimulates and ele- 
vates, drawing up the general level toward its own crested summits. 
They are the great glaciers, and the domed snows of the upper 
Alpine heights, that keep the valley streams so full and cool ; and 
our Colleges are the primal fountains whence flow so far and wide 
in this land the streams of knowledge for the people. 

It would be a grand omission in this argument, if we failed to 
remark that the element of light alone is insufficient to establish 
and insure public tranquillity. One other element must be added. 
Light and Love must be in partnership for this work. Light with- 
out Love is but archangel ruined — the baleful flame of a mighty 
but mahgn intellect. Love without Light is blind, and may do the 
work of Hate. Love to prompt. Light to guide — these together 
do their work well, and make it permanent and abiding. Asso- 
ciate them in human enterprises, and they are strong as God is 
strong. Light and Love come into bridal union in the Christian 
College. The intellectual element, of course, is present. But 



ORATION. 19 

Minerva rules not here alone. It is the preeminent distinction of 
the Colleges of our land, that they embody so much of the moral 
and the Christian element. They were not the creatures of State 
action and endowment. They were founded by pious men who 
cut the inscription deep over their portals, " Christo et Ucdesice.^'' 
Through them run, for the thirst of ardent and acquisitive natures, 
not only the streams from classic springs, but the waters of 

" Siloa's brook that flowed 
Fast by the oracle of God." . 

They are pervaded in a wonderful degree with the beneficent 
and evangehzing spirit. They stand in closest connection with the 
ministry of divine truth. They utter not as partisans and agitators, 
but as commissioned prophets, the sacredness of universal law 
guarding universal right. They strike thus at the root of all evil, 
and sow the seeds of all righteous reform. The work of reform 
may indeed seem to be a disturbing instead of a tranquilizing work, 
but it tends wisely and directly to abiding peace and solid security. 
For wrong is an element always of weakness and change, and 
nothing is settled permanently, under the reign of God, until it is 
settled right. 

So do our Colleges league the State with the ultimate issues of 
human progress, and with the immovable steadfastness of the 
throne supreme. They shine as shine the stars of night, not mere 
revelations of far off, upper spheres, but as lamps of guidance to 
wanderers in the desert and on the sea. They shine as shines the 
sun by day, not to display his own royal magnificence, but to bless 
the waving corn and blushing orchards, to ripen golden harvests, 
and keep alive the cheerful hum of honest human industry. 

Brothers and Fellow- Students : Were we to spend this Festival 
day simply in the exchange of fraternal greetings, we might doubt- 
less make its hours pleasant in passing, and fragrant in memory. 
But the pressure of a peculiar and sacred obligation rests upon us. 
By our double fealty to letters and the State, we owe a debt to the 
cause of liberal learning. Let us not part from this scene and from 
one another, without giving and taking pledges to meet this claim 
to its full discharge. 

We are " The Associated Alumni of the Pacific Coast," gathered 
from many and widely separated beginnings of youthful life and 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

029 912 421 6 

20 ASSOCIATED ALUMNI OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 

chambers of study. Beloved and venerable to each is the name of 
that cherishing mother far away, who calls us still her sons. But 
we are not to-day so much sons of Harvard, or Yale, or of any of 
the honored sister-band of Eastern Colleges, as we are by our new 
local designation Resident Alumni of the Pacific Coast. 

To whom shall this College of California look for the love and 
duty of foster-children, if not to us ? Who shall feel her bondage 
to want, and pay the ransom price of her redemption, if not we ? 
Can she underlie the degradation of such a chain, and we keep \ 

our honor untarnished? In all her affliction shall not we be afflict- 
ed ? What shall we answer? 

Shall we say that this age and this land are too young and new 
for the prosperity of letters ; that our first needs are material, and 
that institutions of learning must wait ? But because of this new- 
ness of the present, it is the era of foundations. If we do not now 
dig deep and build strong, what shall become of the next age ? We 
are fathers of the coming generation — that is, educators — and we 
must take care that our children rise up and call us blessed. 

Shall we say that this is an age of action, too busy for litera- 
ture and the still life of study and thought ? But never was there 
an age so crowded with thought, emotion, sentiment, purpose, ideas 
and utterance as the present ; and never one that called so sol- 
emnly for teachers of right thought, true ideas, noble purpose and 
wise and temperate speech. Our actors are thinkers, orators, poets, 
philosophers, inventors, discoverers and men of science. Action with 
us has a living tongue in the press, an echo in the books by our 
fireside, an immortal chronicle in history. It cannot, therefore, 
be dissociated from schools and mental life. 

Shall we say that the men of the time can only be stirred to 
enthusiasm about works which they can complete themselves — the 
full consummation of which they can look upon and rejoice over — 
that they may be made wilhng to sow for splendid harvests, if they 
may be permitted to reap and bind and garner with their own 
hands ; but that to plow for others to sow, or to sow for other hands 
to reap, requires a more thoughtful and patient ambition than the 
masses possess ? But who then shall feel the ardor of such a dis- 
tant but noble hope, and wait with far-seeing sagacity and faith for 
such a crowning as the world's benefactors ? Are we also unequal 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 912 421 6 



I- 1 



Hollinger Corp. 



